Still no M2M for ModelSerializer..? Guess I'll have to just keep using a ton of shitty hacks.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but I'd suggest opening an issue if you believe there's a problem - we're pretty comprehensive about dealing with incoming issues.
My personal take on this is forget about "shitty hacks" or trying to handle this automatically, and just write the serializer create and update methods explicitly.
Most recently I created a new handler object that runs some introspection of the model. I then override my model view sets' create and update methods to implement the handler. Maybe I should get off my ass and open source it (currently buried in a project).